By: Keith Estiler
studio visits
studio visits
Walt Disney has Mickey Mouse, KAWS has Companion, and Gosha Levochkin has Russian Cowboy. Known simply as Gosha, the rising New York City-based artist devotes the majority of his works and career to the signature blue character with bulging eyes. Taking on unique roles in a variety of compositions, Gosha’s chosen mascot is partially his alter ego; a mouthless protagonist that appears comical at first glance, but touches upon heavy subject matter found within the artist’s personal life and the world at large. “These characters can't have mouths, because they shouldn't communicate. They should just be there for a visual experience. It's almost me,” Gosha explains.
The artist’s mouthless Russian Cowboy was originally inspired by his struggle to communicate as a child with dyslexia. When he was five years old, his grandfather instructed him to draw a toy knight “300 times or whatever” to help him concentrate. “This was in Georgia, the former Soviet Union country and [my grandfather] was watching the World Cup. He grabbed the toy knight from the shelf and said, ‘Draw it perfectly. If you don’t draw it perfectly, I’m going to keep a watchful eye over you,’” Gosha recalls. It was at that moment when the artist found his passion to create art and the strict discipline needed to accomplish a single piece.
Meet Gosha Levochkin’s
‘Russian Cowboy’
Exploring the otherworldly artworks of the Brooklyn-based painter and sculptor.
Gosha Levochkin
Brooklyn, New York
levochkingosha.com
A lot of the ones that aren't detailed are these scary monsters. What's the story behind these subjects?
Gosha Levochkin
I like the way you asked that question. A lot of the figures are sort of abstractions. A lot of them don't have a face. A lot of them are just a flat color, a paint stain or a splatter of paint and just the way that that soaks into the canvas. Moments of abstraction are just as important in the paintings as the detailed faces. So there's really a back and forth to me in creating a kind of balance between what can the paint do on its own as like an abstract element and where do some of these figures become more rendered or they become sort of more familiar, more human, and more detailed. So that's a mysterious thing for me.
How do you select which subjects to paint?
Sometimes I'll be working in a particular face for quite a while, and then get to a point where I just block it out with one solid color. It seems like all the work that went into sort of trying out different details and different layers just sort of leads to a color decision. Then other times, it's really intentional and specific. Like the way I'm starting these new paintings lately, they usually start with couples that are staring into each other’s eyes, they're having a little moment of romance or kissing.
If these subjects stem from human emotions, what kinds of emotions are you emphasizing now in your works?
How long have you been in this studio?
After months of apprenticing under Sato, Gosha decided it was time to pursue a full-time career as an artist. At the age of 21, he drove a car with a trunk full of paintings and stopped by galleries throughout Los Angeles hoping to convince an owner or curator to display his pieces. Most galleries said no until he came across Cannibal Flower, which specializes in urban art. Gosha just so happened to stop by on the same day a representative from the gallery was conducting portfolio reviews, who was enthralled by Gosha’s pieces and asked him to participate in a group exhibition. “I sold my first piece from that group show. I was doing that for six months because each month they'd have a group show, and I would sell all my works. Boom. After that, I got scouted by other galleries for other exhibitions because a lot of representatives would attend those group shows,” he says.
Gosha continued to exhibit his works at local Los Angeles galleries and even started to show in the same spaces as Sato. Those shows displayed his early, highly-detailed paintings that followed the ligne claire style. French for “clear line,” the style was founded by Hergé, the Belgian creator of the cult comic book series The Adventures of Tintin. This style features bold lines of the same width, no hatching, subtle contrasting, and filled with cartoonish subjects set against realistic backdrops. Gosha would stick to this aesthetic until 2015 when he first started painting his Russian Cowboys.
I've been in this studio for nine years. I first moved to New York back in 1999. I had a cheap apartment in the Lower East Side and I was painting in my bedroom for a number of years and waiting tables and bartending. Before I came to New York, I was a biology major. I graduated college and decided to be an artist. I had people telling me the place to go was New York. 20 years later, here I am.
When did you start showing your work at exhibitions?
I started exhibiting my work in New York in like 2004 at a gallery in Williamsburg, then went onto a couple different galleries in Chelsea where I've worked over the years. I've been showing in Copenhagen and recently Hong Kong.
Tell us about your crazy sock art.
A year later, the artist moved from Los Angeles to his current Brooklyn studio and rethought his creative process. He’s now opting for cleaner lines and shapes, and less realism when compared to his earlier works. For these recent compositions, Gosha often spends a majority of time painting the eyes of his Russian Cowboys and supporting subjects. “These characters don’t have mouths, so they have to express with their eyes. It’s definitely a comment on something, like going through abuse as a child or even if you’re an adult,” he explains. “With the whole #MeToo movement, the victims have kept their mouth shut for years. They would just take the punch. I feel like I’m trying to show that with these characters that are mouthless and the only thing they could do is express with their eyes.”
When he’s not painting in his studio, Gosha is instructing aspiring artists at his art school Dirty Hands, located in the Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The project offers an art education unavailable in traditional school settings. For example, Gosha teaches unconventional approaches to contemporary art such as “tapeshit,” a tutorial on making clean shapes when painting canvases. “This school is for people who couldn't afford art school. It's four years of art school crammed into one hour. I’m teaching one-off techniques by what an artist is doing and how they're using it. Not like those cheesy paint and sip places,” he says.
As for the artist’s next steps, Gosha wants to create a solid body of work that casts new light on his Russian Cowboy while garnering the attention of the prestigious New York art market. But, he’s not letting the pressure of the industry dictate or take hold of his creative aspirations. “Getting into this fine art world is like auditioning almost. I'm not trying to get into that audition mode. I'm just trying to have it naturally come,” he says.
Describe the process behind your canvas paintings.
The process in these is stretching raw canvas and then having the raw canvas on the floor and wetting the whole entire canvas with a film of water and matte medium. It makes a thin film for the pigments to really disperse and to travel around the canvas. So I'll give myself one long day of having the canvas on the floor. The way I apply the paint is I stick paint brushes on pool cues and just walk around the canvas and sort of draw into the canvas with the paintbrush on a pool cue. So where you see a broad mark of the red that's just really spread like that, that might be just like one fat brush stroke.
Your color palette is so vivid. How do select the tones for each artwork?
First, I like using colors that bleed and give you a real bright luminosity, so it's these bright yellows, oranges, and magenta. Then, I start working those vivid colors into flesh tones. Finally, I incorporate some darks, like the really deep blues or a Payne's gray. There's a lot of balance between dark and light. A balance between the luminosity of color paired with traditional flesh tones.
So Aaron, what informs your work?
Gosha is entirely self-taught and spent years crafting his intricate technique and recognizable character. Instead of attending a formal art school, he studied graffiti, comics, and Japanese animation. To better hone his skills, Gosha worked as a sales associate for five years at the Blue Rooster Art supplies boutique in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood. “I learned how to stretch canvas. Shit, they won't even teach you that at art school. I learned how to use all the different varnishes, and blah blah blah. Artists would start coming into the store and say, ‘He's the technician. This guy knows his shit,’” Gosha says.
What better way to master your artistic skills than to learn from the masters themselves? At Blue Rooster, Gosha met his favorite artist, Rob Sato, and asked to be his apprentice. Sato is widely-acclaimed for his figurative watercolor paintings and paper sculptures featuring skulls and surreal landscapes, and Gosha especially admired his intuitive approach to painting. “I told Sato that I’ll do anything it takes to be his apprentice. I was already drawing, painting, and doing whatever I could get my hands on. I would scan his books and he'll teach me a lesson in watercolors. That was his medium at the time,” he says.
How has your work evolved over the years?
I was doing reverse painted acrylic polymer peel paintings for a long time, and those were hyper-detailed and all super hard-edged and super meticulous. It got to a point with that where I guess around like 2012, I wanted to start doing something more visceral and more painterly and less sort of slick.
Any advice for aspiring artists?
Good advice is work a lot, experiment a lot, and see a lot of art. Find out who the artist is who you really admire and what do you like about their work, what can you bring into the work, but also how can you experiment with materials and make paint do something that's your own language. At least for me, that's always been really important to my practice.
“These characters can't have mouths, because they shouldn't communicate. They should just be there for a visual experience. It's almost me.”
Gosha Levochkin
“Getting into this fine art world is like auditioning almost."